# SEMDR: A Semantic-Aware Dual Encoder Model for Legal Judgment Prediction with Legal Clue Tracing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09717 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09717/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07289/) (2015)
- [ConSERT: A Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11741/) (2021)
- [CLEAR: Contrastive Learning for Sentence Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15466/) (2020)
- [CAIL2018: A Large-Scale Legal Dataset for Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02478/) (2018)
- [CERT: Contrastive Self-supervised Learning for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12766/) (2020)
- [How Does NLP Benefit Legal System: A Summary of Legal Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12158/) (2020)
- [Lawformer: A Pre-trained Language Model for Chinese Legal Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03887/) (2021)
- [LEGAL-BERT: The Muppets straight out of Law School](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02559/) (2020)
- [GEAR: Graph-based Evidence Aggregating and Reasoning for Fact Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01843/) (2019)
- [On the Sentence Embeddings from Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05864/) (2020)
- [Distinguish Confusing Law Articles for Legal Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02557/) (2020)
- [SAILER: Structure-aware Pre-trained Language Model for Legal Case Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11370/) (2023)
- [Learning to Predict Charges for Criminal Cases with Legal Basis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09168/) (2017)
- [Legal Judgment Prediction via Multi-Perspective Bi-Feedback Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03969/) (2019)
- [Interpretable Charge Predictions for Criminal Cases: Learning to Generate Court Views from Fact Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08504/) (2018)
- [Legal Judgment Prediction with Multi-Stage CaseRepresentation Learning in the Real Court Setting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05192/) (2021)
- [Learning Fine-grained Fact-Article Correspondence in Legal Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10726/) (2021)
- [Text-guided Legal Knowledge Graph Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02284/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [RLJP: Legal Judgment Prediction via First-Order Logic Rule-enhanced with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21281/) (2025)
- [MUSE: Integrating Multi-Knowledge for Knowledge Graph Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17536/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) aims to form legal judgments based on the criminal fact description. However, researchers struggle to classify confusing criminal cases, such as robbery and theft, which requires LJP models to distinguish the nuances between similar crimes. Existing methods usually design handcrafted features to pick up necessary semantic legal clues to make more accurate legal judgment predictions. In this paper, we propose a Semantic-Aware Dual Encoder Model (SEMDR), which designs a novel legal clue tracing mechanism to conduct fine-grained semantic reasoning between criminal facts and instruments. Our legal clue tracing mechanism is built from three reasoning levels: 1) Lexicon-Tracing, which aims to extract criminal facts from criminal descriptions; 2) Sentence Representation Learning, which contrastively trains language models to better represent confusing criminal facts; 3) Multi-Fact Reasoning, which builds a reasons graph to propagate semantic clues among fact nodes to capture the subtle difference among criminal facts. Our legal clue tracing mechanism helps SEMDR achieve state-of-the-art on the CAIL2018 dataset and shows its advance in few-shot scenarios. Our experiments show that SEMDR has a strong ability to learn more uniform and distinguished representations for criminal facts, which helps to make more accurate predictions on confusing criminal cases and reduces the model uncertainty during making judgments. All codes will be released via GitHub.